On magical nominalism: An interview with Martin Jay

Howard Prosser: Thanks for making the time to discuss your new book, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph (University of Chicago Press, 2025). It's the latest in what's been a steady, and impressive, output for half a century now. Your production might even be speeding up! But every book starts as a small idea. Where did this one originate and how long did you mull it over before taking the plunge into another monograph?

Martin Jay: It is always difficult to hazard an answer to such a question, especially if the origins of a project go back almost two decades, perhaps even earlier. Ever since I wrote a review essay on Hans Blumenberg's remarkable book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age in the 1980s, I have, in fact, been intrigued by the medieval philosophy developed by William of Ockham and others in the 14th century called nominalism. It had religious origins in the reassertion of divine omnipotence, undercut the rationalist legacy of classical philosophy, posited a contingent world shaped by will and caprice, and, if Blumenberg is right, indirectly led to the human self-assertion that spawned the modern era. As a student of Weimar culture, I was also interested for a long time in the origins of “magical realism,” which began as a synonym for the Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] and morphed many years later into a literary school identified in particular with Latin American novelists like Gabriel García Márquez.

When I was asked to contribute to a volume of essays celebrating the career of W. J. T. Mitchell, whose pioneering studies in visual culture had been inspirational for my work on the French denigration of vision, I decided to address the philosophical implications of photography. It was then that it occurred to me that something might be discovered by using “magical” not to modify “realism,” which had meant belief in the ontological existence of real universals when Ockham challenged it, but “nominalism” instead, and then think about photography in its terms. I suppose a kind of free association brought together two different discourses and created possibilities for thinking about a range of issues that had hitherto never been treated together, at least to my knowledge.

In any case, the first fruit of the project was an essay titled “Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World,” published in Culture, Theory and Critique in 2009. I then wrote a couple of other essays on similar issues, but put the project aside for several years when I was invited to give the Mosse Lectures at the Hebrew University, which led to a very different kind of book, Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory. It turns out that it was wise to let it simmer for a while on the proverbial back burner, as it required considerably more research and the deepening of my knowledge of the nominalist tradition before I was ready to return to the project. Most notably, I encountered the work of the Polish scholar of Jewish studies, Agata Bielik-Robson, who was independently working on the tradition of what she has called Jewish nominalism or, more recently, mystical nominalism. She and I have had a very fruitful dialogue for a number of years now, which has increased my grasp of the issues and understanding of the stakes involved.

Prosser: Why consider the magical now when life today (modernity, still?) seems so, well, mundane or, following Weber, disenchanted?

Jay: I began with all of the typical modern prejudices against revivals of belief in supernatural or occult practices, and still largely retain them. However, as the ongoing debate about the uneven outcome of secularization has shown us, the residues of previous ways of thought remain potent in surprising ways in our seemingly disenchanted world. Having long ago imbibed the lessons of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which detailed the nefarious effects of the entanglement of those residues with more allegedly “progressive” aspects of modernization, I then wondered if there might also be potentially more positive ones as well. Here Benjamin's openness to the shards of forgotten or denigrated residues of the past provided a kind of model. He was comfortable with using “magical” in a positive way to describe them, and so I began to investigate more seriously its long and vexed relationship to both religion and science, which turned out to be more than simply adversarial.

After the book was finished, I came upon a quotation from Wittgenstein about his early denigration of metaphysics in the Tractatus as a kind of magic, which nicely expresses my own ambivalent attitude: “I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with remarks on metaphysics as a kind of magic. Where, in doing so, however, I must neither speak out for magic, nor ridicule it. The depth of magic ought to be preserved. Yes, here canceling out magic has the character of magic itself” (Wittgenstein, 2018: 30).

Prosser: And what of nominalism? Why now? And why magical?

Jay: Among the reasons for my fascination with the history of nominalism was the realization that it was from its inception not merely a position in an esoteric philosophical debate with realism, but in fact central to larger discussions, often very heated, about the most fundamental and abiding of human concerns. These include, inter alia, our understanding of God and relationship to him; our belief in the human ability to know, make sense of and explain the workings of his creation; our capacity to have aesthetic experiences with privileged instances of that creation; our hopes for improving an imperfect world and creating modes of living together that nurture human flourishing; and so on. Some of these concerns are theological, others philosophical, still others involve social and cultural issues. All have been deeply affected by the nominalist critique of real universals, the ontological and axiological truths assumed to exist prior to human invention.

As I mentioned earlier, Blumenberg argues that one of the most consequential of these effects was the upsurge of human self-assertion filling the vacuum left by the retreat from belief in a harmonious cosmos ruled by divinely mandated reason. Understood in the terms of Horkheimer and Adorno, this implied both the hegemony of humanly generated concepts over the non-conceptual givens of the world and the practical domination of nature. We are, of course, now at a point in human history when our understanding of the costs of human self-assertion, especially in practical terms, is gaining momentum. The answer, in other words, to your question of “why now?” is that living at the dawn of the Anthropocene, if that is indeed where we find ourselves, makes it imperative to reflect on the limits of the self-assertion abetted by the nominalist revolution.

Although there have been many efforts to restore a lost faith in the real universals challenged by Ockham, understood both ontologically and axiologically, I find them unconvincing. Natural law theory or Neo-Scholasticism do not succeed, at least for me, in relieving the anxieties unleashed by the nominalist unmooring of humans from the ideological comfort allegedly real universals once provided. Although nominalism cannot be so easily refuted, perhaps there is a variant of it that is less subject-centered, less intent on subsuming particulars under concepts, less complicit with the domination of nature. It deserves being called “magical” because it recovers some of the awe-inspiring mystery of our contact with the world prior to its being reduced, if we can borrow a term of Heidegger's, to a “standing reserve” for technological purposes.

Prosser: The book's scope is ambitious. You are able to move through a number of different literatures and disciplines, especially in the first part of the work where religion plays a major role. You present nominalism—as via moderna—challenging or displacing Scholastic realism—via antiqua—which foreshadows modern thinking, if not modernity itself. Can you explain why this process is significant?

Jay: Although its origins are often forgotten in contemporary philosophical debates, nominalism emerged as a school of thought largely in the context of theological disputes in the Middle Ages. It reflected a growing stress on what might be called the Hebraic as opposed to the Greek component in Christian theology—the priority, as Tertullian would have put it, of Jerusalem over Athens—which meant favoring God's unconstrained will over the rational rules and cosmic order he may have previously ordained. Ockham was a member of the Franciscan order and was instrumental in overthrowing the dominant Aristotelian theology associated with the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and Scholasticism. The privileging of will over reason became, if Blumenberg is right, the defining characteristic of human self-assertion in a world no longer beholden to rational rules. What I call in the book “conventional nominalism” involved the subjective imposing of conceptual order or bestowing of arbitrary names on a world of radical contingency. Even mathematics could be understood nominalistically as the imposition of quantitative or geometrical order on a world that did not intrinsically possess it.

All of this is widely known, even if the premises of the narrative are still resisted by a handful of contemporary champions of realism, theological or philosophical. The notion of “magical nominalism” introduces a subordinate, often ignored, variant of the nominalist impulse, which has different implications from its conventional counterpart. Rather than displacing the idea of divine omnipotence, or at least the sovereign will of the Creator, onto humans, who assert themselves against the contingency of a universe without inherent order, this hitherto underappreciated variant celebrates the resistance to subjective imposition in unique singularities that escape subsumption under the general rules of either rationalist realism or conventional nominalism. It has sometimes been called “mystical nominalism” (Ernst Bloch) or “Jewish nominalism” (Agata Bielik-Robson), ¹ but I prefer the adjective “magical.” I want to challenge the foundational premise of political theology, which posits that what was once expressed in a religious idiom is substantively prior and therefore superior to its watered-down secular avatars. I want to show that religion itself, Jewish, Christian or otherwise, derives at least some of its original impulses from earlier human relations to the world, in which certain singularities—things, events, words—possess whatever causes a sense of wonder and awe in those who encounter them. Although preserved in transfigured form by religious or theological intermediaries, when they are recovered in our own age, sparks of their earlier magical origins remain available for reignition.

Prosser: What this longer view offers is a positioning of the critical theory tradition within a larger philosophical arc. Your previous work Reason after Its Eclipse (2016) did so in relation to Kant and Hegel, but this book offers connections to throughlines which were noticeable but possibly overlooked because of Marxism's preponderance. Is critical theory really more about nominalism than we previously thought?

Jay: This is a terrific question. Every time I return to the history of critical theory, I discover new ways to frame the narrative, largely based on what you have rightly called different throughlines. In Marxism and Totality (1984), I sought to situate it in the larger Western Marxist struggle to defend a viable concept of totality, which concluded with Habermas's decentered, non-expressive view of the social whole. In Reason after Its Eclipse, the thread I followed began with Kant and Hegel, passed through Marx and Lukács, continued with Horkheimer's defense of “objective” reason against its “instrumental” debasement and finished with Habermas's “communicative rationality.” In Magical Nominalism, unlike in these two earlier works, Habermas plays no role in the argument, while Horkheimer and Marcuse make only cameo appearances. Instead, Benjamin, Adorno and Kracauer, the last of whom was always an ambivalent figure in the Frankfurt School circle, are the sole representatives of a capaciously defined critical theory. They are, moreover, not the only protagonists of the story I am trying to tell, most of whom were never close to the Frankfurt School. I came to know many of the latter through my work on the 20th-century French interrogation of visuality, which involved a very different cast of characters. The chapters on the post-structuralist discourse of the event and the photograph reflect that other focus of my previous research.

Having said that, however, I do think there is an important way in which “magical nominalism” can help make sense of one of the most complex issues in the history of critical theory, which we might call the dual nature of “concreteness,” always positioned as an epistemological and normative alternative to “abstraction.” The latter is often identified with the hegemony of exchange relations in capitalism—what Alfred Sohn-Rethel made famous as “real abstractions”—and the conceptual abstractions of identitarian thought. Dialectical reason, bequeathed to Marxism by Hegel and passed through Lukács to the Frankfurt School—Marcuse's Reason and Revolution would perhaps be its highpoint—understood concreteness in a special way. For them, it signified a “moment” in a complexly mediated, dynamically developing whole, whereas abstraction implied being extracted from that totalizing context, reified into a thing rather than situated in a fluid process, and isolated from its determining mediations. The classic example of abstraction in Hegelian Marxism is the fetishism of commodities, fungible objects for exchange, whose origins in the capitalist labor process are forgotten or repressed. Dialectical reason and the real-world practice it informed, so its adherents hoped, would overcome the fetish of reified abstractions through negation, conceptual and practical, which would undermine their false sense of self-sufficient solidity and recall their origins, albeit in part, in subjective human labor. Ultimately, at least for Hegel and Hegelian Marxism, that negativity would be sublated in a concrete totality that would overcome abstraction and end the alienation experienced in the labor process and elsewhere in capitalism.

At times, this version of concreteness served as an implicit premise of Frankfurt School theory, but there was always an alternative impulse that went in a very different direction. I think I first sensed its existence in one of the early essays I wrote on critical theory before The Dialectical Imagination, which dealt with their critique of Marxist Humanism (Jay, 1972). What I had noticed was their reluctance to adopt the rhetoric of alienation and the restitution of holistic unity, which they attacked as inherently idealist rather than materialist. A genuine materialism entailed the resistance of objects to their subjective constitution, however much they may be shaped by it. The implication was that there was always an excess, a surplus beyond the fully reconciled, organically integrated whole, which could never be fully recuperated (foregrounding, in other words, the “albeit in part” in my previous paragraph). One meaning of Adorno's negative dialectics, as I came to understand later, was resistance to the incorporation of the non-identical into even a mediated totality in which negations were supposed to be entirely sublated.

Now, it turns out that Benjamin was one of the main inspirations for this version of concreteness, which meant valorizing unassimilable singularity. His explicit distrust of Hegelian dialectics meant he never prioritized the concept over the object, nor believed in history as a progressive negation of negations culminating in a grand synthesis of the identical and the non-identical. Adorno, although more drawn to Hegel's legacy than was Benjamin, nonetheless also came to value what he called “non-conceptuality,” which drew much of its power from the nominalist critique of real universals. As I argue in my discussion of his complicated attitude towards nominalism in music, Adorno was often critical of its conventional variant, while tacitly embracing its magical counterpart, in for example his claim that music, for all its debts to structural rationalization, longed for the meaninglessness of the proper name. Here, we might say, concreteness meant irreducible singularity rather than mediated totality, especially when it was imbued with an auratic intensity that lifted it above the positivist validation of mundane “facts.” Negative dialectics is perhaps best understood as a force field with the two senses of “concrete” resisting full reconciliation. The first suggests a transcendence of conceptual domination produced by real abstractions in the world—Adorno's debts to Sohn-Rethel have often been noted—while the second involves a magical nominalist valorization of singular idiosyncrasies that cannot be subsumed under abstract categories, the non-identical that refuses to be sublated into a harmonious whole.

Prosser: Another implication of the approach that you’ve taken in the book is to decompress recent theoretical tensions and see magical nominalism as echoing throughout various contemporary philosophical discussions, especially on history or “events.” Does magical nominalism bring together different perspectives on the past in continental philosophy? And what of any redemptive undertones?

Jay: I’ve always resisted the confinement of theoretical traditions within national boundaries, despite the obvious importance of linguistic differences and different institutional experiences. It would be impossible, for example, to make sense of French thought in the second half of the previous century without reference to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel and Spinoza, even if their legacies were filtered through particular French concerns and often reformulated in an idiom they might have found uncongenial. When it comes to the expression of the magical nominalist impulse—I hesitate to describe it as a self-conscious tradition—it has manifested itself in a heteroclite variety of contexts, and never announcing itself as such. As I indicated earlier, I am also a bit wary of assigning it predominantly to Jewish thinkers, although Bielik-Robson is certainly on to something in noting its anticipation in Kabbalistic theology and reappearance in certain crypto-theological “secular” figures. What struck me, however, is that the impulse also appears in contexts where any connection with a specific religious tradition would be difficult to discern. My final chapter, for example, tries to demonstrate that it can help us to make sense of the discourse generated by the provocative invention of the photograph, most notably Roland Barthes’s celebrated distinction between punctum and studium.

Magical Nominalism is not an exercise in intellectual filiation or the tracing of influences, but rather an attempt to let unforeseen similarities emerge in unexpected places at unanticipated times. In a way, it replicates the post-structuralist discourse's emphasis on those miracle-like events that interrupt settled narrative patterns and resist recuperation by conventional explanatory tools, such as cause and effect. My intention is not to provide a conclusive mapping of possible analogies linking such events across cultures and periods, but rather to stimulate future research that will uncover others that will add complexity and nuance to the handful I have explored. The hope is that whatever “magical nominalism” might mean will be enriched by such later additions to the three-dimensional map.

Does this entail hope for “redemption”? I am wary of the way that word has entered the vocabulary of some contemporary thinkers who would be hard-pressed to spell out what it signifies outside of its religious context. I recently wrote a critique of Adorno's invocation of it as a critical standpoint in the famous last aphorism of Minima Moralia, which may be a chapter in a future book on “theological fellow-travelling,” if I am able to muster the energy to write it. I would say, however, that being sensitive to the appearance of magical nominalist impulses in the modern world does suggest that its “disenchantment” may not be total and that we still can experience the awe and wonder it can evoke. If this means redemption, it is only in a minor key.

Prosser: If not redemption, what about realism? The tension between nominalism and realism is most obvious in aesthetic considerations, which you turn to in the book's second half. For example, you discuss Adorno's relationship to the idea and its critical potential. How does magical nominalism fit with his negative approach to art or philosophy in general?

Jay: I hesitate to give a soundbite answer to this question, as the chapter on what Nelson Goodman called “irrealism” in aesthetics, which features Duchamp and Adorno, tries to be faithful to the extraordinary complexity of this issue. The first challenge is to differentiate between realism meaning the prior existence of universal forms, frequently called Platonic in discussions of aesthetics, and realism in what has become its commonplace meaning as mimetic fidelity to social or natural “facts.” The latter has itself often been attributed to the triumph of nominalism, so the waters are muddied if the medieval meaning is forgotten.

You may recall Adorno's (2017: 205) statement, which draws on the medieval distinction, that “dialectic is not a form of nominalism, but nor again is it a form of realism. For these twin theses of traditional philosophy … must both be subjected to dialectical critique.” My argument is that this critique must include at least a moment of “magical nominalism” to make clear the inadequacies of the “twin theses” in describing the power of art. Insofar as the individual artwork—or perhaps better put, a work that is truly innovative—is in excess of whatever generic form it may seem to exemplify, it cannot be bound by a realist system of universal norms. Insofar as such works also exceed the control of their creators, revealing the resistance of the matter they try to submit to their will, they show the limits of constitutive subjectivity to make art ex nihilo.

In the case of Duchamp's readymades, this means that they both challenge traditional aesthetic categories—not only “painting,” but “art” in general—and exceed by their prior material existence the constitutive fiat of the creative artist, however much his or her enunciative power is exercised when the mundane object is turned into a readymade. Duchamp tentatively spoke a few times of “pictorial nominalism,” a term that the critic Thierry de Duve treated as a key to much of his work. Duchamp's interruptions of traditional aesthetic narratives and transgressions of aesthetic norms have been interpreted by several of the French thinkers treated in the chapter on historical events as themselves transformative events or even “advents.” The latter suggests bringing something new and unexpected into the world. As Goodman would have put it, they respond to the nominalist question “when is art?” rather than the realist or essentialist “what is art?”. They also move us beyond the conventional nominalist “who creates art?”. Instead, they undermine the distinction between art and mundane life, allowing us to see what the Surrealists would have called “the marvelous” even in “found objects” from the latter.

There is, to be sure, a great deal of negation in all of this, as the inflation of mundane objects into art objects is matched by the deflation of what had been traditionally seen as high or even sublime art. Duchamp's sensibility was too ironic, too mocking, too desublimating—think of the effect of peeping through the door on the shocking scene he created in his final installation Étant donnés—to turn him into an exemplary magical nominalist in a positive sense. There is, however, a negative impulse in magical nominalism, one that comports less with a kataphatic theology that attributes positive characteristics to divinity than with an apophatic one that denies the possibility of doing just that. Duchamp's nominalism was in the service of negating received categories and valorizing what was in excess of them, rather than producing positive alternatives which had the capacity to reenchant the world.

Can the same be said of Adorno, the second protagonist in my chapter on aesthetic irrealism? In many respects, he was ambivalent towards the conventional nominalist dissolution of generic categories. He recognized its function in valorizing the idiosyncratic singularity that made artworks more than subsumable exemplars of types. However, he was also afraid of the levelling of the distinction between art and the everyday, something he would have disliked in Duchamp's readymades, had he ever noticed them. Where the magical nominalist impulse appears in his work, especially in his discussion of music, is in his recognition that at its most potent—for him, the “emancipation of dissonance” associated with Schoenberg's atonal compositions—it resists both the tyranny of form and the banality of mere noise. Instead, it allows the listener to experience something unexpected, what we might call an “advent,” that tells us that there is something beyond the infinite fungibility of the exchange principle, something that does not mean anything else, but is like a proper name that just refers to one particular object or person. Or more precisely, it expresses a longing for that utopian state of being, that, despite everything, might one day be achieved. Because we cannot know what that might actually look like, Adorno's magical nominalism, like the theology he sometimes invoked to express a similar yearning, remains, like that of Duchamp, largely apophatic.

Prosser: Speaking of negatives, you also focus on the place of the photograph in representing reality or time. Barthes plays a role here, but so too Siegfried Kracauer, who has always struck me as an underrated, or underread, thinker. How do you see them as adding to our understanding of nominalism's magic?

Jay: Introducing the photograph as another paradigmatic exemplar of magical nominalism moves us into a different register from those already discussed. As a wondrous invention of modern technology and a ubiquitous presence in our lives, it may seem a long way from the miraculous events exalted by post-structuralist philosophers or the esoteric aesthetic interventions of a Duchamp and the exceptional musical innovations lauded by Adorno. It was, however, easy to find examples of reactions to its invention and development that called it magical, and certainly when you consider how astounding and unprecedented it is as a way for humans to see the world around them, the honorific is not misplaced. For the first time, the inexorable onrushing of time could be halted and a moment of contingency captured in a still image with a greater claim to mimetic fidelity than even the finest painting. For the first time, what Benjamin called “the optical unconscious” could be revealed in a way that expanded the range of unaided human sight, while also underlining its limits. For the first time, the masses of humanity could have a permanent record of how their ancestors looked and they themselves had appeared in earlier stages of their own lives.

The parallels with other examples of magical nominalism are striking. Photographs are like events that interrupt chronological and narrative time. They have unanticipated indexical traces of what they capture which defeat the compositional sovereignty of the photographer and earned comparisons with Duchamp's readymades. They also often possess what Barthes called a “punctum,” which produces an emotionally charged response—sometimes traumatic, sometimes blissful—specific to certain viewers. As such, they undermine the culturally conventional, already coded response to most images, which Barthes calls their “studium.” The magical nominalist aspect of this experience is due to the force of something in the image itself, something beyond the intention of either the photographer or the spectator. Rather than reinforcing a personal or communal memory, the photo can unsettle it, producing a feeling of temporal disorientation that contains the chilling realization of our own mortality. These features of the photograph, Barthes tells us, mean that we should not take photos “for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.”

In several writings composed a generation or so before Barthes, Kracauer made similar observations. He understood the photograph's affinity for unstaged reality and contingency, which defeats attempts, pace later critics like Michael Fried, to make it an artistic medium of total creative control. He also recognized its resistance to the replete meaning of what Barthes was to call a photo's “studium,” whether it be located in nature or in history. His magical nominalism, however, was in “a minor key” because he was more skeptical than many other of its advocates about the redemptive, reenchanting potential of recovering Adamic names or auratic objects in the world. If there was any theological impulse coursing through his work, it was of the negative, apophatic kind discernible more in Adorno than Benjamin or some of the French theorists of the event.

Prosser: You end the book “inconclusively,” with some considerations of magical nominalist possibilities. Where do you see the generative possibilities for such ways of knowing in the future?

Jay: The deliberate inconclusiveness of the ending has two implications. The first is that there is no final cadential resolution to the book's argument, which tries instead to foreground its experimental, open-ended quality. I begin without a strong definition of “magical nominalism,” preferring instead to approach its meaning through paradigmatic examples, and I do not want to sum things up at the end with a soundbite takeaway that assumes the case is closed. To honor the role magical nominalism can play in interrupting smooth narratives and negating the domination of particulars by categories, we need to be performatively consistent and not act as if a finished book can somehow overcome the lessons we have learned in writing it.

The second implication derives from the substantive focus of the inconclusive conclusion, which is on the question of political sovereignty. It involves primarily the challenges magical nominalism makes to Carl Schmitt's notion of a unified decisionist sovereign, which the book had earlier traced to conventional nominalism's legacy of human self-assertion. Indirectly, however, it also suggests that the sovereign control of an author over his or her text, like that a creative artist tries to assert over a traditional artwork, cannot be total. In the preface, I play a bit with the notion that this book shows the mark of the “late style” suggested by Adorno and Edward Said. Among other things, this means it allows itself to be overwhelmed by the force of the material it addresses rather than pretending full mastery over it. The hope is that it sparks further speculation and new research rather than leaves a “definitive” account that acts as a tombstone marking the end of a discussion. The intention in adducing paradigmatic examples, which relate analogically rather than deductively, is to suggest that others, perhaps many others, will be added in the future, revealing hitherto unimagined facets of the magical nominalist impulse.

Prosser: More reflexively, what did you learn from writing the book? I mean, surely there are welcome surprises that come from the thinking–writing construction process. And, while we’re on that, what do you hope others learn from it?

Jay: I think it is fair to say that this project differed significantly from any of my previous ones in several unexpected ways. First, as I mentioned earlier, it took much longer than I thought it would. I discovered that it can be productive to let something gestate slowly and in the background, while you focus on other projects. In this case, it allowed me to clarify my understanding of the differences between conventional and magical nominalism, and benefit from discovering a Jewish theological dimension to my story, which I would not have grasped prior to the work of Bielik-Robson that I had the good fortune to read a decade or so after I began.

Second, I realized at some point that I was sticking my neck out more than usual with this project because no one had previously posited something called “magical nominalism,” let alone tried to identify the dots that might be connected to flesh it out. I realized that I would have to draw on my prior research experience to see if figures whose work I had encountered in a different discursive context might have something in common if understood as paradigms of the new one. What this suggests is that it is always possible to return to familiar figures and texts with new questions, and if they are rich enough to repay the attention, will provide some unexpected results. But it also may imply that reshuffling cards to generate a fresh take on familiar material can only be attempted near the end of a career, when you have already been playing the game for a while. This is the reason I recognized the result as expressing something of the “late style” developed by Adorno and Said.

A final lesson I learned concerns the now familiar debate over political theology, or more broadly speaking, the meaning of secularization a whole. It is often argued that secular ideas owe more than is acknowledged to their occluded religious origins, a claim that can undermine their self-grounding legitimacy. In the case of nominalism, this meant understanding Ockham's critique of the realism of universals in the context of the Franciscan insistence on the omnipotence of God's will, which roiled late medieval Christianity. It also meant taking seriously the origins of magical nominalism's frequent valorization, especially by Walter Benjamin, of the name over the concept in the teachings of Lurianic Kabbalism. I do not deny the importance of these generative contexts, but by raising the possibility that magic in some instances might be even more fundamental than theology, I want to challenge the premise that everything starts with established religion and then derivatively survives as a crypto-theology in secular garb. Instead, I hope to remind us that religion itself has often been unsuccessful in overcoming its own prior origins in practices and beliefs that it tried hard, if often in vain, to abject. Their survival may have surprising resonances still today, which complicate the dominant narratives of secularization.

Prosser: Finally, where does that mean you’ll head next with your writing? You say you play with the idea of your own “late style” in the preface and conclusion; is there more “late” Jay to come? What I mean is are there any other ideas that you simply have to corral into a few hundred pages or will you stick to the shorter article form from now on, like those collected in Splinters in Your Eye (2020) and Immanent Critiques (2023)? A memoir, perhaps?

Jay: Having reached my ninth decade, I have no illusions about the wisdom of embarking on a major project, but it is frankly hard to break the lifelong habit of writing virtually every day about something. Now that we can miraculously call up the libraries and archives of the world on our computer screens—an enormous privilege someone who retired only a generation ago could not have enjoyed—it is possible to follow wherever your curiosity might lead. Even texts in exotic foreign languages can be quickly translated, and algorithms send you research on topics you are investigating without even being asked. So as “late” as Magical Nominalism may be, it is definitely not the end. There is perhaps a modest volume on what I call “theological fellow-travelling” in the works, but I am not sure.

The opportunity to continue is also enabled by an extraordinary platform I have had since 1987, when Robert Boyers, the editor of the distinguished “little magazine” Salmagundi, invited me to contribute a semi-annual column on a subject of my choosing. I’ve been able to roam widely in pastures beyond the boundaries of my professional identity, often reflecting on the larger implications of episodes in my life or the implications of current cultural and political events. Among the most recent efforts were reflections on the movie American Fiction and the book on which it was based, Percival Everett's Erasure; finding my “googlegangers” online and its implications for the rigid designation of proper names; the decade of my episodic contributions to the Tehran Times and the censorship that ended it; the relationship between conspiracy theories and normal cognition; the implications of distinguishing “the people” from “the population”; and Black artists and the “aesthetic alibi,” just to mention a few. Over the years, some of these have found their ways into my essay collections, and perhaps a number of the newer ones will find a second life there as well. Because several have been stimulated by personal anecdotes, whatever appetite I may have for writing a memoir has been largely sated by their existence. I would, frankly, prefer to go out grappling with a new intellectual challenge than fashioning an unexciting academic's life into an apologia pro curriculum vita sua.

Prosser: Then we look forward to more grappling, Martin. Thanks for making time to chat.

Jay: Many thanks, Howard, for your probing questions and to Thesis Eleven for generating and publishing our conversation.